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IRAN HUMAN RIGHTS (MARCH 13, 2018): The 10th annual report on the death penalty in Iran by Iran Human Rights (IHR) and ECPM shows that in 2017 at least 517 people were executed in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This number is comparable with the execution figures in 2016 and confirms the relative reduction in the use of the death penalty compared to the period between 2010 and 2015.
Nevertheless, with an average of more than one execution every day and more than one execution per one million inhabitants in 2017, Iran remained the country with the highest number of executions per capita. 2017 Annual Report at a Glance: At least 517 people were executed in 2017, an average of more than one execution per day111 executions (21%) were announced by official sources.Approximately 79% of all executions included in the 2017 report, i.e. 406 executions, were not announced by the authorities.At least 240 people (46% of all executions) were executed for murder charges - 98 more than in 2016.At le…

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States are stockpiling lethal injection drugs that could be used to save lives

Study shows four states that adhere to capital punishment are hoarding stashes of medicines that could otherwise treat patients in life-or-death procedures

Death penalty states, including Arkansas which will carry out a double execution on Thursday should the courts give the go-ahead as part of an unprecedented week-long killing spree, are stockpiling vital drugs for lethal injections that could be used in tens of thousands of potentially life-saving medical operations, a new study has found.

The study looks at just four of America’s 31 states that still adhere to capital punishment and finds that they are hoarding sufficient stashes of medicines to treat 11,257 patients in surgeries and other possibly life-or-death procedures, for executions. Were the findings from Arkansas, Arizona, Mississippi and Virginia extrapolated to the rest of the country, the number of operations that could be supported by the drugs would reach into the tens of thousands.

Several of the medicines are officially in short supply, with hospitals finding it increasingly difficult to lay their hands on them. As a result, doctors are making compromises in their care choices that are only being intensified by US prisons redirecting the chemicals towards the death chamber.

“The public must realize that when states take these vital drugs and repurpose them as poison and use them to kill, there are serious consequences,” said Dr Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist at Emory University hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. “People don’t appreciate that these drugs might one day be needed for their own medical treatment.”

One of the four states reviewed by the study, Arkansas, has embarked on a rapid-fire schedule of executions this month that has been decried as a “conveyor-belt of death”. The Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, initially planned eight killings in 11 days, but after local and federal courts imposed stays in three of the cases the state now intends to kill five inmates in a single week.

According to the study overseen by Zivot, Arkansas has stockpiled sufficient supplies of the three drugs to treat 1,800 patients in potentially life-saving operations. Instead, it is determined to redirect them to putting at least five men to death.

On Thursday, two prisoners, Ledell Lee and Stacey Johnson, are scheduled to die at 7pm and 8.15pm respectively, though both executions are currently on hold at the behest of courts. The state plans to follow up next Monday by killing Marcel Williams and Jack Jones, and on 27 April it will be the turn of Kenneth Williams.

An army of lawyers deployed by the Arkansas attorney general’s office is locked in an epic struggle with public defenders representing the five remaining condemned men in multiple ongoing court proceedings over whether or not they should die. On Wednesday, the state supreme court ruled to halt Johnson’s execution, saying that he should have a chance to prove his innocence with more DNA testing. Further legal challenges are ongoing, and the tussle is almost certain to end later on Thursday at the door of the US supreme court, which was similarly engaged on Monday night when it declined to allow the execution of Don Davis to go ahead.

The death row inmates facing the gurney in Arkansas have already petitioned the US supreme court, calling on the nation’s highest judicial panel on Wednesday to reinstate an earlier federal court ruling that put their executions on hold on grounds that they could be exposed to cruel and unusual punishment. That ruling was later overturned by the eighth circuit court of appeals.

Maya Foa, the director of the human rights group Reprieve that has led the campaign to stop life-saving drugs reaching US death chambers, said: “It is deeply perverse that departments of corrections across the US are sitting on shortage medicines that could be used to save hundreds of patients’ lives.

“As if this hoarding wasn’t dangerous enough, Arkansas has further undermined public health by introducing an ‘execution secrecy’ law which creates serious risks of drug diversion, counterfeiting, and contamination.”

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A man convicted of murder in a San Antonio robbery more than 9 years ago was executed Tuesday evening after proclaiming his innocence.

Reginald Blanton, 28, received lethal injection for the April 2000 shooting death of Carlos Garza at the 22-year-old man's apartment.

In a brief statement after he was strapped to the Texas death chamber gurney, Blanton insisted his execution was an injustice and he was wrongly convicted.

"Carlos was my friend," he said, looking at Garza's mother, wife and 3 sisters, who watched through a window a few feet from him. "I didn't murder him. What's happening right now is an injustice. This doesn't solve anything. This will not bring back Carlos."

Blanton also complained the lethal drugs that would be used on him weren't allowed to put down dogs.

"I say I am worse off than a dog," he said. "They want to kill me for all this. I am not the man that did this."

SUGAR LAND, Texas (KTRK) -- The Sugar Land man, who was within an hour of execution when the call came for clemency, is now off death row.
Bart Whitaker has been moved to an inmate processing facility in Huntsville, a day after his death sentence was commuted.
Gov. Greg Abbott commuted the death sentence of the 38-year-old Thursday after considering the pleas of Whitaker's father, Kent, who insisted he would have been victimized again should his only remaining immediate family member be executed.
Patricia and Kevin Whitaker were killed in the ambush orchestrated by Bart Whitaker on Dec. 10, 2003. Kent Whitaker was also shot but survived. It was a failed attempt by Bart Whitaker, prosecutors say, to secure an expected inheritance of more than $1 million if his entire family had been killed.
"It's a new day", said Kent Whitaker on Friday.
He hasn't yet been allowed to speak with his son yet.
"He's been given basically a new life, and I hope that he will f…

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Among the suspects on the list of the country’s 10 worst mass shootings, Nikolas Cruz is alone in one thing: He was taken alive.
His arrest raises the rare prospect of a death penalty trial for a massacre, a huge undertaking with far-reaching consequences for all involved. Some would not be satisfied without an execution, while for others the trial itself would bring anguish.
The chief prosecutor here in Broward County has said that the killing of 17 people at a high school on Valentine’s Day “certainly is the type of case the death penalty was designed for.” A trial may be the only opportunity to lay bare all of the facts. But it would also likely be televised and followed by lengthy appeals, provoking years of public agony, as well as sustained attention for Mr. Cruz, who has already confessed.
Over years of mass shootings, from a university campus in Huntsville, Ala., to a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., prosecutors have struggled with this conundrum, testi…

Alva Campbell — the convicted murderer and Ohio death row inmate who entered the death chamber in November but left 20 minutes later after a suitable vein for injection could not be found — has died, according to a report from this organization’s partners at WBNS 10TV.
The Columbus Dispatch reported that he died of natural causes.
Campbell, 69, had multiple health problems, including issues with his veins. He had asthma, emphysema and required an external colostomy bag, according to court filings and parole board testimony.
The state agreed to use a wedge pillow to help him partially sit up on the execution gurney because of his breathing problems. PREVIOUS COVERAGE: New death date set for man after state halted his execution
Campbell was sentenced to death for fatally shooting Charles Dials, 18, in 1997 after stealing his truck during an escape from custody. He was set to be put to death on a rescheduled date of June 15, 2019.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich issued the reprieve for Campbell a…

The following document is a written record of convicted killer Hamida Djandoubi's last moments before he was guillotined in a Marseilles prison on September 10, 1977.

This record -- dated September 9 -- was written by a judge appointed to witness the execution.

Djandoubi's execution was the last execution carried out in France before capital punishment was abolished in 1981.

Then-President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who had voiced his "loathing for the death penalty" before he was elected to office, flatly turned down Djandoubi's appeal for clemency and chose to let "Justice run its course", as he did on two previous instances (Christian Ranucci, executed on July 28, 1976 and Jérôme Carrein, executed on June 23, 1977).

Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian national, was sentenced to death for killing his former lover, Elisabeth Bousquet.

FLORIDA -- The state executed a man for the 1993 rape and murder of a Florida college student Thursday.

Authorities say 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. Thursday after a lethal injection at Florida State Prison.
Eric Scott Branch, 46, was found guilty for the 1993 rape and murder of Susan Morris in Pensacola.
Authorities said Branch attacked Susan Morris in January of 1993 as she walked to her car at the University of West Florida.
Branch dragged Morris into a nearby wooded area, where he beat, strangled, and sexually battered her.
Branch then left Morris' body in a shallow grave and stole her car to flee the state.
Branch was previously convicted for the 1991 sexual battery and beating of a 14-year-old girl in Indiana.
He was also convicted in Bay County, Florida for another sexual battery.
His execution was put on hold at 6 p.m., pending final appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court rejected the appeals without comment.

The Alabama Supreme Court has set execution dates for 2 inmates, 1 for the man convicted in the 1989 pipe bombing that killed a federal appeals judge in Mountain Brook, and the other from an inmate who asked the court to expedite his own death.
The court set April 19 for Walter Lee Moody's execution for the death of U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert S. Vance. Justices also set March 15 for the execution of Michael Wayne Eggers, the Alabama Attorney General's Office confirmed Friday.
Eggers was convicted of 2 counts of capital murder in connection with the Dec. 30, 2000 murder of Bennie Francis Murray, of Talladega, during the course of a kidnapping and robbery.
While the Alabama Attorney General's Office asked for an execution date for Moody, Eggers had submitted on Jan. 10, 2016 a hand-written motion to the Alabama Supreme Court asking that his execution be "expedited."
In 2016 a federal judge, after listening to mental health experts, declared th…

SINGAPORE - Convicted drug trafficker Billy Agbozo was executed last Friday (March 9) after he failed in his clemency plea.
Agbozo, 39, a Ghanaian national, had been found guilty and sentenced to death on July 4, 2016, for trafficking 1.63kg of methamphetamine here in his luggage in April 2013.
The Misuse of Drugs Act provides for the death penalty if the amount of methamphetamine trafficked is more than 250g.
Agbozo was "accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel throughout the process", said the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB).
CNB added that 1.63kg of methamphetamine is sufficient to feed the addiction of about 1,210 abusers for a week.
Agbozo had travelled by plane from Accra to Dubai on April 4, 2013, before boarding a plane bound for Singapore. He arrived here the next day and planned to spend five nights here.
But he was stopped by checkpoint inspectors who screened his luggage - a black haversack and a red-and-black suitcase.
White,…

The state of Alabama executed Michael Wayne Eggers-- an inmate who asked to die-- on Thursday night at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. His time of death was 7:29 p.m.
This is the first execution the state has carried out this year.
Just before 6 p.m., the set execution time, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution and announced they would not review the case. Their decision came after Eggers' former attorney filed petitions for a stay and for a writ of certiorari on Monday.
Eggers, 50, was convicted of capital murder in 2002 for the death of 67-year-old Bennie Francis Murray. In 2016, the inmate said he wished to expedite his execution date and fired his attorneys from the Federal Public Defender's Office in Montgomery.
Eggers' execution started at 6:54 p.m., when the curtain to the three viewing rooms opened. The warden first read Eggers his death warrant, and then asked if he had any last words. Eggers replied, "No ma'am."
At 6:56 p.m., E…

President Trump has been privately praising Singapore, the small city-state once known as the world’s most active executioner per capita.
This is according to Axios, which reported Sunday that the president has been telling friends for months that the death penalty should be imposed on drug dealers in the United States — similar to a policy enforced for decades by Singapore. Trump repeated those sentiments during a surprise appearance at an opioid summit Thursday, but the president did not explicitly say that he wants capital punishment for drug dealers.
“If you shoot one person, they give you life, they give you the death penalty. These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people and nothing happens to them ... Some countries have a very, very tough penalty, the ultimate penalty,” Trump said, without naming any specific country. “And, by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do. So we’re going to have to be very strong on penalties.”
Axios reported that Trump has told confi…

DPN opposes the death penalty in all cases, unconditionally, regardless of the method chosen to kill the condemned prisoner. The death penalty is inherently cruel and degrading, an archaic punishment that is incompatible with human dignity. To end the death penalty is to abandon a destructive diversionary and divisive public policy that is not consistent with widely held values. The death penalty not only runs the risk of irrevocable error, it is also costly to the public purse as well as in social and psychological terms.The death penalty has not been proved to have a special deterrent effect. It tends to be applied in a discriminatory way on grounds of race and class. It denies the possibility of reconciliation and rehabilitation. It prolongs the suffering of the murder victim's family and extends that suffering to the loved ones of the condemned prisoner. It diverts resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it. Death Penalty News is a privately owned, non-profit organization. It is based in Paris, France.Your donations to Death Penalty News DO make a difference.